George W. Bush was the first Methodist president in a century.
But officials of the 7.9 million United Methodist Church spent
eight years either condemning him or unsuccessfully seeking
audiences with him. Bush could not even find a suitable Methodist
congregation in Washington to attend and mostly settled on
convenient St. John’s Episcopal Church across the street from the
White House. A recent farewell summary of church attitudes
towards his presidency by the United Methodist News Service
understatedly observed that some United Methodists “view him as a
hero leading others over a challenging terrain,” while others
stressed that his “policies conflicted with the principles of his
own denomination.”
United Methodist officials were obsessed with condemning the Iraq
War. The Council of Bishops officially denounced the U.S.-led war
four times across four years, while never specifically
criticizing al Qaeda or Saddam Hussein. United Methodism’s chief
Capitol Hill lobbyist formally called for Bush’s impeachment, a
call that he later reluctantly retracted. And Bush’s liaison to
religious groups, after speaking to an angry audience of United
Methodist social activists in 2001, concluded they hoped that
Bush would quit the denomination, and he largely prevented Bush
from meeting with most high-level Methodist groups. Bush declined
to speak to the church’s governing conventions in 2004 and 2008,
although fellow Methodist Hillary Clinton had addressed the 1996
General Conference as first lady.
Such was not always the case. The last Methodist president was
William McKinley, who contemporary Methodist prelates saw as the
embodiment of Methodist civic accomplishment. Unlike Bush, who
married into Methodism, McKinley was a lifelong Methodist.
McKinley prayed the sinner’s prayer at the altar as a youth,
foreswore most vices (he did drink wine and smoke cigars later in
life), was a Sunday school superintendent, and hosted hymn sings
in the White House. But Bush and McKinley were also similar.
Neither trusted spell-binding rhetoric and preferred stolid good
works. Both were conservatives of a sort, but also Methodist
do-gooders who saw politics as a moral adventure. Both led their
nation into controversial wars that opponents derided as
imperialism.
Although now almost forgotten, the Spanish-American War was a
“war of choice,” launched chiefly to liberate Cuba from Spanish
colonial rule. Spain’s quick defeat resulted in U.S. occupation
of Cuba, Puerto Rico, and the Philippines. An eventual Filipino
insurrection resulted in a vicious war, in which U.S. troops
allegedly committed atrocities, and where 4,000 Americans died,
or the equivalent of about 16,000 today. Northern Methodists
largely supported their President. Southern Methodists, who were
mostly Democrats, were more wary, especially about the racial
implications of governing non-Caucasian Filipinos.
A Methodist delegation visited McKinley in 1899 and, as they
later admiringly recounted in a church magazine after his
assassination, the chief executive explained his divinely
inspired decision to seize the Philippines:
I walked the floor of the White House night after night until
midnight; and I am not ashamed to tell you, gentlemen, that I
went down on my knees and prayed Almighty God for light and
guidance more than one night. And one night late it came to me
this way — I don’t know how it was, but it came: (1) That we
could not give them back to Spain — that would be cowardly and
dishonorable; (2) that we could not turn them over to France and
Germany — our commercial rivals in the Orient — that would be
bad business and discreditable; (3) that we could not leave them
to themselves — they were unfit for self-government — and they
would soon have anarchy and misrule over there worse than Spain’s
was; and (4) that there was nothing left for us to do but to take
them all, and to educate the Filipinos, and uplift and civilize
and Christianize them, and by God’s grace do the very best we
could by them, as our fellow-men for whom Christ also died. And
then I went to bed, and went to sleep, and slept soundly, and the
next morning I sent for the chief engineer of the War Department
(our map-maker), and I told him to put the Philippines on the map
of the United States (pointing to a large map on the wall of his
office), and there they are, and there they will stay while I am
President!
It would have been notable had Bush shared a similar testimony
about Iraq with modern visiting United Methodists. Despite the
lack of strong United Methodist contact during his presidency,
Bush has retained his membership at Highland Park United
Methodist Church in Dallas, a mega church that is one of the
denomination’s largest. Its pastor, Mark Craig, whose 1999 sermon
about Moses and leadership is credited for helping to inspire
Bush’s run for the presidency, has remained a quiet Bush friend
and was instrumental, as a board member, in persuading Southern
Methodist University (SMU) to host the future Bush Library.
Another Bush Methodist minister friend, Kirbyjon Caldwell,
pastors a megachurch in Houston and famously delivered
Christocentric prayers at both of Bush’s inaugurations. This
year, having endorsed Obama’s candidacy, he participated in
inaugural prayer services once again. Caldwell, who conducted the
wedding of Bush’s daughter last year, praised the now former
president as a “firm believer in the Lord and Savior Jesus
Christ” who reads the Bible daily. “Theology and practice for
John Wesley came together, and frankly, I think that may be one
of the components that enables President Bush to be so
comfortable with his faith-based initiatives program, where the
concept is arguably to take the sanctuary to the streets,” he
told the church news service.
But more typical was retired Texas Bishop Joe Wilson, who
groused: “If Mr. Bush is to be characterized as a United
Methodist, he clearly has departed from the practice of and
respect for some of the church’s beliefs as demonstrated in
United Methodist tradition of faith and practice.” Wilson was one
of over two dozen mostly retired liberal bishops who petitioned,
along with left-wing SMU faculty, against SMU’s hosting the Bush
Library. Prelates like Wilson, along with the church’s lobby
office, called the General Board of Church and Society, opposed
Bush on tax cuts, missile defense, Kyoto, abortion, homosexuals
in the military, support for Israel and countless other issues.
More evenhandedly was an analysis of Bush’s political theology
delivered
in 2007 at a Methodist symposium at Oxford, England by SMU
theologian Billy Abraham, an Irish Methodist and theologian in
residence at Bush’s home church in Dallas. Amid the denunciations
by other Methodists of Bush’s supposed fundamentalism and
imperialism, Abraham described Bush as a “moderate, even liberal,
evangelical shaped by the spiritual warmth, the ad hoc social
activism, the reserved moralism, the friendly fellowship, the
wariness of alcohol, and the theological fuzziness of United
Methodism in Texas.”
According to Abraham, Bush theologically “knows and believes the
internal soteriological logic of creation, fall and redemption as
parsed by contemporary evangelicalism” in America. As a
conventional and pragmatic proponent of American civil religion,
Bush believed that “life in American fits God’s design for
humanity better than its rivals.” The Iraq War and democracy
promotion, according to Abraham, allowed Bush to “take American
civil religion to the Middle East and then onward into the Muslim
world.”
Bush’s autobiography is titled after Methodist hymn writer
Charles Wesley’s song’ “A Charge to Keep I Have,” which is also
the title of a painting that Bush kept in the Oval Office of an
early Methodist circuit riding preacher. “Bush’s compassionate
conservatism draws heavily on the kind of revivalism that was
common in Methodism in North America in the late 19th century,”
Abraham noted. And Bush’s brand of American civil religion “harks
back to a longstanding embrace of a similar vision” by many
Methodist leaders in the 19th century. Abraham did not cite the
Methodist delegation that listened to McKinley’s Philippines
confession, but no doubt they fit the type.
Supposedly, when President McKinley was pressed to describe his
political philosophy, he insisted he was “just” a Methodist. Bush
potentially could similarly respond.
